Spitting Image, one of Britain’s most successful television shows, was
widely rejected by the industry as “kids’ stuff” before being commissioned.

John Lloyd, the comedy writer and producer who worked on the satirical puppet show which attracted up to 15 million viewers a week, said that concept for Spitting Image was dismissed on many occasions before it finally aired in 1984.

He said: “We went to almost every tv company and everyone said 'No, we don’t want it, it’s kids’ stuff’.

"I remember spending most of the first year writing myself letters begging to be fired from this complete disaster. And of course it turned out to be this extraordinary, iconic thing.”

The show, which famously lampooned public figures including John Major, Ronald Reagan and members of the Royal family, was commissioned by Central Independent Television for ITV, where it aired for 12 years becoming one of the station’s most successful ever series.

Lloyd recalled how MPs were offended by the show’s smallest details. “You could say that somebody was totally corrupt, that they’d committed murder even, and they didn’t mind at all, they’d chuckle in a knowing way. If you said they had a big nose, it was 'oh no that’s really below the belt’.

“I think David Steel is the only politician on the record who said it hurt his career. One Tory MP once said to me 'You shouldn’t be allowed to do this.’

“MPs used to say to me, 'If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go and live in Russia?’ And I would say, 'That’s one of the great advantages of living in a democracy - you’re allowed to criticise’.”

In an interview on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Lloyd also spoke of his unhappy years at West Hill Park School in Titchfield, Hants, where from the age of nine, he was beaten and often starving, and later at Kings School, Canterbury, where he was also regularly beaten.

Of his prep school years, he said: “Bullying was endemic. Everybody just beat each other up all the time. Then you got the slipper the whole time and there was not enough to eat and we all suffered from scurvy.

“The trick was to smuggle food into the school. So cress seeds, for example, were immensely prized. You could get some in your pencil box and hide it under your protractor and then you’d grow cress on your flannel in your locker.

“A potato was like a gold ingot. If we could get a raw potato, we’d sneak into the woods at the weekend and somehow light a little fire and cook this potato and share it out between four of us. We used to eat conkers. I’m not joking.”

Lloyd recalled his years at King’s School, Canterbury as “violent, nasty, extremely lonely and difficult”.

He said: “It’s left me with a real resentment of authority wielded unfairly or wrongly, because of the days when you were told 'Go to your room, Lloyd, or I’m going to beat the backside off you’.

"One guy actually took a run up, stood on the sofa and jumped down on to the sofa and gave me six, in my pyjama bottoms. And you think 'that’s not right’ but at the time you’re so used to it and inured to it because of the years in prep school.”

Lloyd, 61, who produced the BBC Blackadder series, also spoke of suffering from severe depression in his early forties.

“I woke up one Christmas Eve and thought 'I just can’t see the point of anything at all’,” he said. “It was the most alarming thing, particularly alarming because I had everything. I went right down to the bottom. I used to sit under my desk crying for no reason, it was quite extraordinary.”

Lloyd, who has three children with his wife, Sarah, said: “I refused to admit I was mad or mentally deranged in any way. It seemed to me it was a perfectly logical situation - I’d been badly treated by a few people and I was depressed and angry.”

He went on to create the BBC quiz show, QI, which he described as “a spin off of my ultimate search for meaning”.

Lloyd’s choice of music for his desert island included Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals, Walk of Life by Dire Straits and Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.

His luxury was a supply of flower and vegetable seeds and his chosen book was The Book: On the Taboo Against KnowingWho You Are by Alan Watts.